How a Nebraska Farm Boy Came to Write a Novel About Scottish Earls and Kings and Someone Named Macbeth

Andrew Schultz is a teacher, professor and writer who enjoys woodworking, reading, traveling and learning. He currently lives in Lincoln, Neb. For more information on his book, "Saints and Heroes," visit http://www.saintsandheroes.net.

When
‘me Mum’ died, I promised I'd write about her family. My mother
was a British war bride who arrived in America in 1946. I arrived in
1949, and she raised me in a predominantly Czech community, Schuyler,
Nebraska, to be an Edwardian gentleman. Unfortunately, it never took.

Mother
was a proud British expatriate, a London school teacher who'd
regularly herded her students down into the underground during the
blitz. She'd married a heroic sergeant in the Army Air Corps, Lumir
Schultz, a Czech farm boy, who'd convinced my mother that he was the
equivalent of British landed gentry when he'd inherited the farm in
the “bohemian alps” of Nebraska.

Nebraska
was a bit of a shock for someone from London, as the farms in the
countryside were still without electricity and the town, Schuyler,
was just installing sewer lines in the early 1950s. There were still
many outhouses in the town. As a kid she sang me to sleep with
"Charlie is me darlin'," "Rule Britannia" or
"Christopher Robin" and she made me a kilt from the
Menteith family tartan for my first day in kindergarten. Yes, I was
that
odd boy.

Her
maiden name was Jean Monteith Rathbone, the melding of a fine English
family name, Rathbone, (she vaguely claimed Basil Rathbone as "a
distant cousin") with one of the ancient clan names of Scotland,
Monteith, and its earlier spelling variation, Menteith.

Thus,
I grew up with tales of the Scots and the Menteiths, of their deeds
and misdeeds, of the interactions with the Stuarts, the Comyns, and
the Grahams, how Rob Roy stole Menteith cattle, and of course, how a
Menteith infamously betrayed William Wallace.

So,
naturally, after an abnormal childhood living in two worlds, rural
Nebraska outside and a hyperventilating Britannia at home, I
sometimes felt a citizen of both and occasionally a boy without a
country. I failed at spelling bees because I spelled theater as
theatre,
color as colour,
and because my mother had taught her students the Queen's English, I
spoke grammatically perfect English, much to the chagrin of my
classmates, some of whom had Czech as their first language.

In
1987, when she passed, I began to write down the family stories she'd
told and sorted through a host of pictures she'd left.

I'd
been stationed at Edzell, Scotland for three years from 1970 to 1973
while in the U.S. Navy at the northeastern edge of what had
constituted the Menteith Earldom in Perthshire. This tiny burg is
midway between Dundee and Aberdeen and about 120 miles north of
Edinburgh. While in Scotland, I'd tramped the mountains, prowled the
lochs, visited the castles and cairns, tubed the rivers, hunted the
game and visited the pubs of Scotland with great abandon. My roommate
in the barracks was an ornithologist, John Trapp, and he and I roamed
the coastlines and fence lines in pursuit of golden eagles, curlews,
rooks, puffins, water ouzels and the great hawks and harriers of the
coastal plains before the Grampians. We hung out around harbors and
stalked the wild asparagus. John had a sparrow he called "Woodstock"
and a hedgehog living with us in the barracks and he was always
returning from a ramble with some wild thing he'd discovered in his
pockets.

Together
we attended fests and county fairs and we heard a good number of
squeezeboxes and fiddles in the pubs where we'd eat our lunches and
suppers. The musical tradition was profound. Every pub rang with song
and these songs spoke of the ancient land, the old heroes and the sad
lamentations of poverty, war and hard lives.

I
was the anchor on the base tug'o'war team and we pulled at highland
games throughout the country. Our most significant moment was pulling
before Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne during the Braemar games in
the early '70s. We were a group of eight 20-year old sailors and
marines and our opponents were the Arbroath farmers, a team whose
median age was at least 62 years old. They towed us three times
across the chasm to our utter humiliation.

The
cox (or whatever the equivalent term is in tug'o'war parlayance)
cried, smoke pouring from his pipe, his tweed coat and cap atilt, "Ah
rat na boys, tek a strain", and we leaned back on our heels and
the thick hawser snapped taut. After ten minutes my forearms and
hands were screaming and then the cox coughed, "And a one, and a
one, and a one." On the first count, 8 of the farmers right
boots stomped backwards, digging their heels into the turf in perfect
harmony. They tugged us to and fro three times. Humiliating is not an
adequate a term.

As
these memories were recalled, I wrote them down and added them to the
stories my mother told, and sorted through the pictures she'd left
me, how to tell the story I'd promised. Ah, research. I'd learned how
to conduct research through my graduate studies and as I was in
California at the time, I began at the Huntington Library in
Pasadena, which maintains a large archive of British historical
documents. I also searched at the Library of Congress, University of
Virginia, and University of Nebraska.

The
earliest mention of the Earldom I could find was in 1138 when King
David awarded a tract of land to Gilchrist, Earl of Menteith, but
another reference referred to it as one of the seven ancient earldoms
of Scotland. These were: The Earldom of Angus, Earldom of Caithness,
the Earldom of Carrick, the Earldom of Fife, the Earldom of Mar, the
Earldom of Menteith and finally the Earldom of Strathearn.

Then
I came across a reference to King Malcolm Caenmore establishing the
seven ancient earldoms. Who was this King, I asked, and what was his
story? As I studied, I found it was Malcolm who'd been orphaned by
Macbeth killing Malcolm’s father King Duncan as Shakespeare had
written, but that this occurred in the 11th
century not the 13th.
With that realization, I thought, "the games afoot" to
quote my mother's improbable cousin, Basil Rathbone. I wanted to find
out this story, the "true" story and this is what’s led
me to finishing Saints
and Heroes,
the true story of Macbeth, Malcom Caenmore and his Queen, Saint
Margaret of Scotland.